from the do-these-guys-never-think-anything-through? dept

Given how important teenagers and those in their 20s are to the movie industry, you'd think one day they'd learn to stop being complete assholes to that demographic. For example, you'd think that they'd realize that young folks today really, really like their smartphones, and one of the main things they do with those smartphones is snap pictures or videos of just about anything and everything and share it with their friends via whichever platform they prefer, be it SnapChat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Vine, Facebook, Twitter or whatever else they might be using. It's just what they do -- and they seem to be doing it more and more often. Yet, the MPAA wants to make sure that if kids do this, theaters should call the police to have them arrested as quickly as possible.

The thing is, the MPAA should know that this is a recipe for disaster. In 2007, Jhannet Sejas went to see Transformers, and filmed 20-seconds to send to her brother to get him excited to go see the movie. The result? Police were called, she was arrested and threatened with jailtime. She was eventually pressured into pleading guilty to avoid jailtime. Samantha Tumpach wasn't quite so lucky. She, along with her sister and her friends, went out to the movies in 2009 to celebrate her sister's birthday. Since they were all having fun, she decided to film some of the group while they were watching the movie. Once again, police were called and she was arrested and spent two nights in jail. After widespread public outcry, prosecutors dropped the charges.

Given those high profile cases, combined with the fact that smartphones have become more ubiquitous, and the pastime of taking photos and videos has become ever more popular, you'd think that maybe, just maybe, someone at the MPAA would think to teach theater owners to be a bit more lenient about the kid just taking a photo or filming a couple seconds of a video. But that's not how the MPAA operates. Its goal in life seems to be to think up ways of how it must have been wronged, and its weird and stupid obsession with movies captured by people filming in the theaters is really quite ridiculous.

The MPAA recommends theaters institute a "zero tolerance" policy, which appears to mean calling in the police if anyone so much as raises a smartphone. Here are a few snippets:

The MPAA recommends that theaters adopt a
Zero Tolerance
policy that prohibits the video
or audio recording
and the taking of photographs of any portion of a movie.

Theater managers should
immediately
alert law enforcement authorities whenever they
suspect prohibited activity
is taking place.
Do not assume that a cell phone or digital camera
is being used to take still photographs
and not a
full-length
video recording.
Let the proper
authorities determine what laws may have been
violated
and what
enforcement
action should
be taken.

Theater
management
should determine whether
a
theater
employee or any other
competent authority
is empowered
to confiscate recording devices,
interrupt or
interfere with the camcording, and/or
ask the patron to leave
the auditorium.

Even better, the MPAA reminds theaters that they should tell employees about their "TAKE ACTION! REWARD," in which employees who capture an evil pirate in action get a whopping $500. In order to get the award, one of the requirements is "immediate notification to the police." The theaters have to have posters, like the one above, on display if they want their employees to get the cash, so expect to see that kind of crap in theaters everywhere. And expect that employees seeking to cash in on that TAKE ACTION! REWARD to be calling the cops all the freaking time, because some kid raises his iPhone to take a quick picture of his buddies or something cool on screen.

Could the MPAA really be so out of touch and so completely oblivious that they think this is a good idea? Do they not employ anyone who has spent any time around teens and folks in their 20s? Do they honestly think that most police officers don't have better things to do than rush to the local theater every 15 minutes because some employee is trying to get his $500 and the way to do that is to turn in the kids having fun and trying to share the experience (not the movie itself)? And, most importantly, does no one at the MPAA think that maybe, just maybe, turning theater employees into complete assholes will make fewer people want to go see movies?

Of course they don't. That's because the MPAA is made up of lawyers, like this guy, who are obsessed with one thing, and one thing only: "evil pirates who must be stopped." It really seems like when the movie industry does well, it's in spite of the MPAA. What a disastrous organization, working against the industry's actual interests.

from the somewhat-encouraging dept

Last month, through all of the secrecy shrouding the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA), it was revealed that the treaty called for the same criminal copyright sanctions that European citizens widely rejected when those same sanctions showed up in ACTA. This was just as people feared, and those who noticed were furious that the EU would try to quietly undo the public's ACTA victory so quickly and brazenly. Of course, the reaction to CETA is so far nowhere near the critical mass that led to the ACTA protests — but it looks like the negotiators are afraid of recent history repeating, and may just have gotten the message that they can't do whatever they want behind the public's back. TechCentral reports (found via The 1709 Blog) that more recent CETA documents reveal a weakening of the ACTA-like criminal provisions. There has even been some stance-softening from pro-ACTA powerhouse Karel De Gucht:

...according to documents from the Cyprus Presidency of the EU seen by IDG News Service, the CETA text has been greatly watered down in order to avoid a similar outcome [to ACTA]. The intellectual property protection chapter is now understood to say that countries "may" provide for criminal procedures and penalties.

Even European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, who pushed hard for the ACTA agreement, admits that changes must be made. "Since the negative vote of the European Parliament on ACTA, we have been changing the language obviously," he said in an interview with Vieuws.eu. "We should have no illusions, there are still a number of difficult issues to tackle."

Interestingly, though, there is still a strong push for CETA to include criminal sanctions for video recording in movie theaters... championed by Canadian negotiators. We've had a specific criminal law against recording a movie without permission of the theater owner in Canada since 2007 — a law that, like many of Canada's anti-piracy efforts, was primarily the result of U.S lobbying. This is typical of U.S. tactics when it comes to intellectual property law: push your closest friends and neighbors to adopt the strictest laws possible, then put pressure on international negotiations to export those laws around the globe and enshrine them as the norm. Thankfully, these latest leaked negotiation documents suggest that the EU is against Canada's proposal.

from the disgusting-abuse-of-power dept

You may recall a few years ago when the movie industry went ballistic on Canada, because it didn't have a criminal law against recording movies in theaters. With the way the industry and its supporters were talking about it, you would think that this meant people could record a movie and upload it with no legal problems, but that simply wasn't true. There were still civil laws against such recording, and the industry could enforce those. On top of that, there were still plenty of existing laws against distribution. Yet, there was a big campaign claiming that camcording in Canada was where 40 to 70% of all the leaked movies came from. This number was made up out of thin air, and seemed obviously false when another campaign for similar laws in New York City then claimed that 50% of camcorded movies online came from NYC. Either way, the lies about the numbers were effective. The industry got its law criminalizing recording a movie.

We've already discussed the Wikileaks releases on US influence on Canadian copyright law, but TorrentFreak points us to a particularly interesting cable on the subject of camcording in Canada. It kicks off with the embassy admitting that the movie industry was now claiming that perhaps only 18% of camcorded movies came from Montreal, despite an earlier claim that it was 40%. Not surprisingly, the MPAA only made a big stink when it claimed the numbers were in that 40% to 70% range... and was pretty quiet about the revised number.

The cable goes on to note that Canadian law enforcement thought the whole thing was pretty silly, and didn't believe camcording was a big deal. Instead, they (quite reasonably!) felt that their efforts would be better focused on stopping things like counterfeit pharmaceuticals from circulating. Later in the report is the really scary part, where Canadian law enforcement (the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) admitted that a particular individual was arrested twice as a "personal favor" to the movie industry, despite his actions not actually breaking the law:

With regard to the arrest of the individual who
had been pursued by the CMPDA, RCMP officers stated that
they arrested the individual "as a personal favor" to a
[movie industry] official, and that they did not view theater
camcording as "a major issue."

The TorrentFreak article goes on to note the tragic details of the individual who was arrested -- again, despite not having broken any law, and apparently as a "personal favor" to someone in the movie industry:

The arrest triggered a chain of events which would lead to Adam, who had a history of depression, enduring a 14 month wait for any charges to be brought. He went on the run, was detained and eventually sentenced to jail. Adam began using drugs in jail to cope with his imprisonment and shortly after his release he tragically died of an overdose.

from the evidence-please? dept

So, the MPAA's latest target for crackdowns on camcording appears to be India. You may remember that it went through a series of questionable claims about camcording in Canada and the US, where if you looked at the math, none of it added up. Apparently, the same thing is happening in India and the reporters at the Associated Press don't feel the need to investigate bogus Hollywood numbers. In this AP report about the MPAA's new "crackdown" on camcording in India, the reporter says that camcording is to blame for 90% of "pirated" movies:

A year in the making, the coalition to fight film piracy in India will work with movie theaters to crack down on camcorder piracy -- the source of 90 percent of all pirated DVDs -- with police to tighten enforcement, with Internet service providers to fight Internet piracy and with politicians to create more effective laws.

With these big professional reporters, you might think they would try to fact check a claim like "90% of all "pirated" DVDs come from camcorded movies." They might have trouble doing that, because the actual research suggests something quite different. A study that we wrote about a few years ago found otherwise. Specifically, it found that "77% appear to have been leaked originally by industry insiders."

But, of course, we need to save the AP, because they do real fact checking, right?

from the it-is,-isn't-it? dept

While he has no official say in the matter, it is still worth noting that Chris Weitz, the director of the movie New Moon has said that he thinks it's "terribly unfair" that a 22-year-old girl was jailed and now faces felony charges because her attempt to film some of her sister's birthday celebration caught less than four minutes of New Moon on her video camera (found via Copycense). Weitz is not the copyright holder and has no real say in what happens, but he does note that he's talking to Summit Entertainment, the studio who made the film, to let them know of his concerns, to see if there's anything that can be done.

Of course, what should be done is that the law should be changed so we don't have these ridiculous situations at all. And hopefully he would stand behind such a proposal. In the meantime, it's just yet another in a long line of examples of the law creating punishment that is way out of proportion with the "crime" when it comes to copyright and copying of content.

from the seems-to-rule-out-a-lot... dept

Michael Geist points out that a guy in Canada has been convicted under an anti-camcording law for recording a showing of the movie Dan in Real Life (I'm sure it was big on all the torrent sites). However, what struck me as interesting was the punishment handed out. The guy is on 24 months of probation, has to perform 120 hours of community service, is barred from entering a movie theater or associating with anyone involved in movie piracy. And... he is barred from owning any recording device.

That seems a bit broad. After all, most mobile phones these days are recording devices. Any computer is a recording device. An iPod can be a recording device. I can understand the thought process that went into such a ban, but it seems to overreach in its intended impact.

from the please-explain dept

You may recall that throughout 2007, the MPAA was on something of a worldwide campaign to get governments to pass new laws with stricter punishment for "camcording" movies. Of course, camcording is not really a big deal. The quality is bad, and DVD-quality releases find their way to pirates pretty quickly anyway. The "losses" from camcorded movies are minimal, though it didn't stop the MPAA from totally making up numbers that were clearly bogus. Each place they pressured to get new laws apparently represented some huge percentage of camcorded movies on the market, such that if you added them up, you were talking about well over 100%. Then, of course, there was the case where they claimed that anti-camcording laws in the US had wiped out piracy in the US. Of course, that was when they were pushing for such laws in Canada. Two months later when they were pushing for such laws in the US, suddenly New York represented 40% of all camcorded movies.

However, what was most disturbing was the idea existing laws weren't already enough to deal with whatever "problem" camcording represented. So, it's rather interesting to see that a guy who was caught camcording movies in Maryland was just sentenced to 21 months in prison under a 2005 law. So why did the MPAA scream bloody murder about needing new, more stringent laws in 2007? As for someone getting 21 months in prison for filming a movie that was probably already available online from a studio leak, well, that's a different issue for another day...

"I think it's perfectly fine that some people choose to post the movie online. It shows that people are interested in it.... In the IT society of today it's naive to think that this wouldn't happen. We consider it a huge compliment."

In fact, it appears his only real problem is that the quality of recording isn't so great, though he notes that hopefully this will drive more people to the theater to see a better quality version. It's nice to see more folks in the movie business recognizing that unauthorized copies aren't the end of the world.

from the remind-us-again dept

Back during the big debate over the need for new laws against "camcording" a movie in Canada, Michael Geist pointed out that existing laws were already perfectly fine in dealing with the problem. Of course, despite all of that, the power of the movie industry lobbyists was too strong and the bill still became law. So, isn't interesting to find out (via Geist again) that a recent arrest for camcording in a movie theater didn't even happen under the new law, but under the old copyright law. So, once again, can someone explain why the MPAA needed that new law and why Canadian politicians agreed to it?

from the gotta-earn-those-lobbying-bucks-somehow dept

After successfully bullying Canada into passing stricter anti-camcording laws, using bogus stats, it appears that the MPAA has moved on to a new country: the UK. TorrentFreak lets us know that MPAA chief Dan Glickman has crossed the pond to warn UK politicians about the horrible "threat" of camcorded movies. Of course, he's still making up stats and still ignoring what's actually happening in the industry. We've already seen that while Glickman gets paid big bucks to hype up the threat, these laws don't seem to stop camcording activities at all. However, more importantly, camcording doesn't appear to be much of a real threat to the industry. Remember, first of all, that the industry is bringing in record revenue, despite the increasing availability of movies online. Second, the problem isn't from camcorded movies. Most of the movies you find online are studio prints leaked by insiders. Third, even with these laws the movies are going to end up online... and all it takes is one movie getting online for it to be infinitely available. Stopping just a few of those recording the movie is absolutely meaningless if a single one gets through, and it always will. If the movie industry spent a fraction of the amount of money they're wasting lobbying for these useless laws on improving the movie-going experience or offering additional incentives to purchase, the industry would be doing even better than it already is -- and no one would even worry about some movies being available online.